In the field of the detection of marine targets, one technical problem to be solved is the optimisation and the auto-adaptation in real time of the radar waveform used for the detection of the targets, depending on the operational requirements and on the environment acquired and analysed by the radar in real time. Contrary to land, the maritime environment perceived by the radar fluctuates (weather, current, waves, etc.).
Currently in surveillance radars, the choice of the waveform used is rather made manually by the operator from a plurality of predefined waveforms available in the radar, the operator being the person who operates the radar.
The drawbacks of this solution are in particular the following:
the required time spent by the operator analysing the operational situation (type of target to be detected, sea environment, meteorological conditions, etc.) and choosing the adapted waveform. Thus, experience shows that the operator sometimes uses a waveform without changing it during a radar pass, or even an entire mission, at the risk of not adapting the waveform to the environment;
the operator must, to make this choice judiciously, on the one hand have been trained and on the other hand have a non-negligible experience;
since the waveform is chosen from a limited number of waveforms predefined beforehand (typically between 3 and 5 for air/sea detection processing), even the best choice of the operator does not ensure that the parameters of the waveform are perfectly adapted to the target to be processed and to the environment present at the time of the mission; it will be noted that the radar has many capacities that are not exploited by the operator due to a shortage of time and a lack of knowledge;
the choice of waveform is made, by the operator, depending on his own perception and evaluation of the environment, often enriched by knowledge of meteorological information. However this evaluation may be limited in accuracy, in particular because what the operator thinks he knows is inaccurate, and does not necessarily correspond to that perceived by the radar during its detection processing. It depends on the operator and on his workload.
Automatic management of the waveform also exists in certain combat radars. It allows, in particular for air-air modes, the passage between standby and pursuit modes, the lock-on domain at long distances and that at shorter distances or optionally the passage of targets to high-off boresight sectors, to be managed. This type of management effectively allows the load on the operator to be lightened and the performance of the radar to be improved. However, on the one hand it does not take into account the fluctuating nature of the maritime environment, such as sea clutter in particular, which is a key performance factor, and on the other hand it makes a selection from predefined waveforms, but does not optimise in real time the parameters of the waveform.